Ubuntu 17.10 Artful now uses Wayland as default

After several boring releases, Ubuntu 7.10 Artful Aardvark is going to be an interesting release owing to many facts. The biggest change in Ubuntu 17.10 will be migration to GNOME shell instead of Unity shell developed by Canonical. Open source enthusiasts are impatiently observing the evolution of Ubuntu 17.10 to see how much unity experience will be retained in GNOME shell.

The changes in Ubuntu 17.10 is not only limited to shell transition and visual aspects, it also includes migration to Wayland, a protocol for compositor to talk with it's clients. It will replace existing X-window manager. It won't be much of visual change for end users, but under the hood it will improve security, and user experience.

Summarizing the migration to Wayland, Mr Didier Roche, an Ubuntu contributor has published an article in his blog.

Today’s change is hopefully an unnoticeale change for most of you, but
gives better security, a smoother and great experience on our journey on
transforming the default session in Ubuntu Artful.

As it looks unlikely we’ll be able to port gparted nor ubiquity to
wayland this cycle, and those are needed to install Ubuntu, the live
session (and only live session) is running on Xorg
for now. As well, in addition to the option that are available in GDM
to select between the Wayland (default) and Xorg session for both Ubuntu
and vanilla GNOME for people who want to, the upstream detection
mechanism should cover most of the case.